(That’s me going “Mac…Mac…Mac…” as I tally each laptop. I can’t be certain, but I believe that the guy in the brown zip-up sweater at the 0:09 mark is Tobias Lütke, Shopify’s CEO and the guy who offered me my current job. Strange how things work out.)

It used to take a fair bit of jiggery-pokery to set up a Rails development environment on Windows. That’s not the case anymore, thanks to RailsInstaller, a single double-clickable setup program.

By default, RailsInstaller installs all its software into the C:\RailsInstaller directory, creating it first if necessary. I broke away from the default and instead specified that the software should go into a new directory called C:\Rails, a name that I thought made a little more sense:

And we’re off!

Less than two minutes later:

And finally:

With the install wizard complete, we get kicked into command line mode to set up git and SSH:

And that’s it! I checked to make sure it was working by creating a new Rails app:

…we have lift-off!

The first time you run Rails on Windows, you might get a message from Windows Firewall asking if you’re cool with Ruby communicating with the outside world on private and/or public networks. I said “yes” to both:

So far, Rails on Windows, as installed by RailsInstaller, has been working like a charm for me.

Links

RailsInstaller.org: Site for the all-in-one Rails-on-Windows installer. They say they’re working on Mac and Linux versions, which they hope to release in the future.